Obama launches economy push with middle class focus

7/24/13 3:38 PM EDT

President Barack Obama sharpened his focus on the economy Wednesday, looking to breathe new life into his second-term agenda with a fresh pivot back to the issue a majority of Americans feel most acutely in their daily lives.

Aware that his legacy will in large part hinge on the economy he leaves behind, Obama signaled — not for the first, nor presumably the last time — that he’s determined to help poor and middle-class Americans get on sturdier financial footing.

“I care about one thing and one thing only, and that’s how to use every minute of the 1,276 days remaining in my term to make this country work for working Americans again,” he said at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., in what the White House billed as a major speech bookending an address he gave at Knox in 2005, just months after becoming Illinois’s junior senator.

“I believe this is where America needs to go. I believe this is where the American people want to go,” he said in his long-winded remarks, which lasted more than an hour.

Obama’s priorities for the rest of his presidency are, he said, “good jobs, a better bargain for the middle class and folks working to join it, an economy that grows from the middle out.”

It’s a message similar to the one he campaigned on in 2012 and highlighted at the start of his second term with a prediction that his agenda would, in large part, focus on the economy.

But that vision stalled during the early period when second-term presidents are generally most productive, and was sidetracked over the past six months by, as the president described it, “an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals.”